Revising the past

Nov 29, 2004

On 16 March 2003, this blog was still in its infancy. Much of the updates were done directly in SQL. As a result, entries lacked proper markup and consistency. Some referenced images that have since moved, or had typographical errors. Of course, I decided to wade back through some entries and fix these boo-boos.

Little did I realize that I had set my ‘date’ field as a TIMESTAMP data type. As you may already have guessed, my revisions destroyed the original timestamps of the posts themselves. Suddenly, posts with low IDs were appearing on the main page as recent posts, and I discovered my mistake.

I had put this off until now, as it was a minor thing. Once erased, I had no means of restoring the dates (no backups!). Therefore, I went through and guessed proper times for each entry. It helped that the edited entries were usually bracketed by other, pristine ones—these gave me a guide from which to work.

My re-mastered journal is now in proper chronological order. The only lingering problem is the existence of ID gaps (deletions, mistakes). I’m going to leave those as-is, since MySQL’s internal ID counter will continue to generate gaps.

After that rather pointless tale… nothing to report.

Update:
As I was typing the above text, I clicked my new ‘Preview’ button and noticed that the date and time were not showing correctly in entry preview mode. This has been fixed. I have not yet decided whether to document entry update/modification times or not, and where to store such information.

I must say, the new preview feature is fantastic, as I have revised this post well over four times before actually committing it to the site.